


It Also Travels in Time

by hermybookworm



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-15
Updated: 2014-11-15
Packaged: 2018-02-25 10:14:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2618171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hermybookworm/pseuds/hermybookworm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode 1x01, "Rose". Rose Tyler just turned the Doctor down when he asked her to be his companion. Was it because his ears were too big? The Doctor takes a detour in a very unexpected place before returning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Also Travels in Time

Maybe it was the face.

The new ears were a bit big, and it he appeared to be older than her… The Doctor tried to mentally slap himself, but he wasn’t too good about the ‘mentally’ part. His cheek still stinging, he twisted one of the knobs in front of him. Since when did he care about his appearance? And of course he looked older than her--the age gap was nine hundred years, give or take twenty or so. And it wasn’t like he cared what she thought of him anyway. She was just a human.

A human that had chosen her useless lump of a boyfriend over a handsome time-traveling alien from another planet.

The Doctor flipped a few switches and pulled a couple levers without looking at his destination. He liked to let the TARDIS decide his next adventure sometimes, just to spice it up a little.

He glanced at one of the blank screens that littered the console and pulled at his ears. They weren’t that big, were they? No, he told himself, stop it. She just didn’t want to come, and that was okay. It’d happened before, and he wasn’t going to go back and ask her again. That was his rule: if they say no, that’s it, no going back. He wasn’t going to break his own rules for this random human girl, even if she had just saved the world with little to no instruction.

The Doctor sighed, and then realized that he’d landed. Hopefully it wasn’t Korsmap again, that place was disgusting, very unsanitized. He walked over to the door and swung it open. The Doctor frowned. This couldn’t be right.

It was London again, but something was different. The air smelled older, but--he sniffed--not too much older, maybe ten years or so. What were the odds? He shrugged to himself and stepped out of the TARDIS, locking the door behind him.

Immediately, something zipped by him, and before he could get a could look it was gone. His only clue was a flash of blonde hair as it whipped around the corner. The Doctor grinned and followed at once.

As far as he could tell, the thing he was following was a woman in maybe her mid-twenties, and as he ran to catch up with her he realized she was a lot faster than she looked. When he finally did catch up with her, he tapped her on the shoulder. She stopped and looked at him, a very annoyed, confused, and familiar expression on her face. He blinked. He’d seen her before.

“What do you want?” Yes, he’d definitely met this woman, but where? Her eyes were narrow as she scanned his face.

The Doctor forced himself to smile. “Just wondering if I can help.”

“With what?”

“Well, you clearly need help, why else would you be running so fast?”

She walked to the end of the block and peered around the corner. Then she sighed and turned back to him. “I’m looking for my daughter, she’s run off.”

“Were you yelling at her?”

The woman glared at him. “No! She was showing me her maths test. Got a hundred percent on it, too, and then she just bolted! Doesn’t even know London yet, only nine years old, and here she is mucking about.” The woman shook her head. “She’s lost by now, I just know it, and I need to find her so if you’ll excuse me…” She waved sarcastically and took off down the street again.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. That woman had no idea what she was doing. You didn’t look for kids that didn’t want to be found, you just… He turned slowly around, his seventh sense telling him that something was watching.

As he reached one hundred and eighty degrees, the Doctor noticed a small face looking at him from the doorway of an office building across the street. She looked enough like her mother that he recognized her at once, even from a distance. Her blonde hair stood out against the dull building behind her. The Doctor crossed the street quickly.

The girl looked like she was going to run, but the Doctor put his hands up in a surrender. “Your mum’s about to have a heart attack, you know,” he told her. Her tongue poked out between her teeth when she smiled. One of his hearts skipped a beat. He asked, “What’s your name?” but he knew the answer before she spoke.

“Rose,” the girl said, and giggled. “I’m gonna be in so much trouble.”

“It’s not funny,” he said, but he couldn’t stop a grin from spreading across his face. He wasn’t sure how the TARDIS had managed to take him here, but he wasn’t going to complain.

Rose’s giggle turned into a full laugh, and before long she had to sit down because she was laughing so hard. “She’s been running around the neighborhood for an hour,” Rose informed him between gasps for air. “And I’ve been here the whole time!”

“Why’d you run off?” The Doctor sat down next to her. “Couldn’t have been the test, your mum said you got a hundred percent on it.”

Rose quickly sobered. “She kept going on and on about how smart I was. It got annoying, so I just ran. She won’t say I’m so smart now.” She twisted a piece of her hair around her finger and refused to look up at him.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows at her. “But you are smart, you know.”

“You only just met me,” Rose said, but she was biting back another smile.

He shrugged. “It takes skill to hide in plain sight.”

"Who are you, then?" Rose asked. 

"I'm the Doctor," he replied with a grin. 

"The Doctor? What kind of doctor?"

He thought about that for a moment. "That's not what people usually ask."

"I'm not a usual person."

He supposed she was right about that, and tried to come up with an answer. But he just couldn’t think of anything. What had he done that was so special? All he’d managed to do was destroy his planet.

"I'll have to get back to you on that," he said, his voice quiet, and stood up. 

Rose scrambled to her feet. "You're leaving? What if my mum--?"

"Rose!" The Doctor turned to see Jackie Tyler rounding the corner, walking faster than he would have believed possible.

Rose shrank back, definitely no longer laughing. “Hey, Mum,” she said.

“What were you doing?” Jackie asked, the anger already seeping out of her voice. She pulled Rose into a hug. Over Jackie’s shoulder, Rose rolled her eyes at the Doctor, who grinned.

“Sorry,” Rose muttered.

Jackie turned to the Doctor, clearly starting to get suspicious again.

“How did you find her?” she asked.

The Doctor shrugged. “I guess she just wanted to be found.”

Jackie kept a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “You should leave,” she told him. Rose looked up at her mother’s face.

“Come on, Mum, he’s not so bad,” she said. Jackie raised an eyebrow. “At least let him stay for dinner.”

The Doctor recognized this as dangerous territory. He was already messing with his own timeline, creating a paradox. This Rose would potentially remember him in later life, meaning that his whole adventure with older Rose would be different, infused with her asking him a whole bunch of questions. He definitely could not stay for dinner.

But he couldn’t just leave without fixing the paradox he’d stupidly gotten himself into.

“Er, just a moment,” he said, and jogged over to the TARDIS, leaving Jackie and Rose staring after him. Once inside, he rummaged around on a shelf and triumphantly emerged with a small spray bottle that had previously contained bug spray. He rushed back outside to see the two women standing in exactly the same position he’d left them, and walked over to them.

Before they could ask him what was happening, he sprayed Jackie in the face with the bottle. She stumbled backward and blinked. When her vision cleared, she stared at the Doctor.

“Excuse me, but who are you?”

The Doctor grinned and turned to Rose, who put her hands up.

“What did you do to her?” she asked. “Don’t spray me with that thing!”

The Doctor hesitated. This was the girl that had saved his life and the entire world to boot. He didn’t particularly want to spritz her with memory serum, but she would save the world one day. It had to be done. So he did it and tried not to feel too bad when she stared at him in confusion a few seconds later.

“See ya,” he said, and headed back to the TARDIS.

“See ya?” he asked himself. “Nice one.”

He flipped some switches and turned a few knobs. The TARDIS started to wheeze, and he grinned at the familiar noise. This time he knew exactly where he was going.

When he landed, he swung the door open to see a grown-up Rose facing him, waiting, with the useless Mickey by her side. The Doctor leaned out of the TARDIS.

“By the way, did I mention, it also travels in time?” he asked. Rose’s grin, the same as it had been when she was nine, filled him with a joy he hadn’t felt since before the Time War. He stepped back and waited. Either she came, or she didn’t.

She did.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, thanks for reading! I'd love to hear what you thought :)


End file.
